AFP
Graphic showing number of known executions around the world following report by Amnesty International condemning widescale capital punishment in China.
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HONG KONG—China’s ruling Communist Party has declined in recent years to make public the number of people it executes every year, in spite of challenges from international human rights groups.

According to Harry Wu, founder of the U.S.-based Laogai Foundation, which produced evidence of extensive organ harvesting from executed prisoners, recent years have seen executions transformed from a spectator sport into a state secret, carried out behind closed doors.

“The Chinese Communist Party in the past always regarded executions as positive news,” Wu said. “The suppression of evil elements was regarded as a cause for celebration.”

Amnesty International on Tuesday called on Beijing to reveal how many people they execute and sentence to death, as the organization published its world overview of the death penalty for 2009.

It said thousands of executions “were likely to have taken place” in China, where information on the death penalty remains a state secret.

The group said that estimates based on publicly available information grossly under-represented the actual number of people killed by the state or sentenced to death.

“The death penalty is cruel and degrading, and an affront to human dignity,” Claudio Cordone, Amnesty International’s Interim Secretary General, said in a statement on the group’s Web site.

“The Chinese authorities claim that fewer executions are taking place. If this is true, why won’t they tell the world how many people the state put to death?”

Slow reforms

Hospital employees in the southern province of Guangdong indicated a roaring trade in organs for transplant in interviews in 2005, boasting that a liver could be available in as short a time as a week, with one nurse saying that “most” were taken from executed prisoners.

“They would always execute a bunch of people on the eve of a major festival as a public spectacle,” Wu said. “This was seen as something the ordinary people like to see, and as a basic method of keeping down the number of criminal offences and counterrevolutionary acts.”

Chinese courts then moved to putting up a notice for a single day, following new guidelines in 2002, Wu said.

“Then they stopped even putting those up. They don’t even inform the relatives now,” he said. “And now they no longer announce the numbers of those who have been killed.”

Deputy director of Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific division, Roseann Rife, said it should be remembered that China’s officially published execution figures may be less than the true number of executions carried out.

But she said China had reported fewer executions since new guidelines on the use of the death penalty were issued by the country’s Supreme Court. She also called on Beijing to make its execution figures public.

‘Miscarriages of justice’

Beijing-based rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong, who attended the United Nations’ Fourth World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Geneva in February, said the fact that China’s judicial system still lacks political independence is a cause for grave concern.

“When judges and courts handle cases, they are unable to proceed according to their own understanding of the law,” Jiang said.

“What’s more, China engages in proactive law-enforcement tactics, which means that if something happens, they will go on a campaign to ‘strike hard’ [at such crimes].”

“It’s very easy for miscarriages of justice to occur under wave after wave of campaign-style law-enforcement,” Jiang said.

He said China would be unlikely to abolish the death penalty while it is still under single-party rule, since moves to abolish the death penalty are linked to respect for human rights and democracy.

A spokesman for the Hong Kong-based Joint Committee for the Abolition of the Death Penalty, whose members include Amnesty International Hong Kong, Community of Sant’Egidio, and the Justice and Peace Commission of the Hong Kong Catholic Diocese, said nearly 130 Hong Kong citizens had been executed in mainland China in the past decade, all for nonviolent crimes.

“Out of these, more than 80 were executed for drug-trafficking offenses,” Ke Enen said.

“We call on China at least to reform its use of the death penalty, even if it is unable to abolish it yet, and to abolish the use of the death penalty for economic and nonviolent crimes.”

Amnesty International’s report, Death Sentences and Executions in 2009, reveals that at least 714 people were executed in 18 countries and at least 2,001 people were sentenced to death in 56 countries last year.

Original reporting in Cantonese by Grace Kei Lai-see, and in Mandarin by Xi Wang. Mandarin service director: Jennifer Chou. Cantonese service director: Shiny Li. Translated and written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

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Amnesty International has released its annual death penalty report, which shows the number of countries that use capital punishment is declining. But the report estimates that China executed several thousand people in 2009.

Arthur Judah Angel was sentenced to death in Nigeria in 1986 for a crime he says he didn’t commit.

“Being on death row was like being in hell. You understand? In fact, it’s very horrible. I don’t have enough language – in English or my own – to explain it,” said Angel.

He was 21 years old when he was arrested and spent the next 16 years in prison. Every night he was there, he says, he had nightmares.

He says inside the cell he wasn’t even able to stretch his legs.

“The size of the cell measured exactly seven feet by eight. We have the toilet bucket occupying about two feet square in there. And we sleep sometimes 13 of us to a room,” he adds.

He says he thought each day might be his last.

“I witnessed the execution of nothing less than 450 – I can still remember their names. From Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to noon, it would be anybody, “Angel said.

Today over 800 people are on death row in Nigeria – but in 2009 no-one was executed.

Across Sub-Saharan Africa only two countries carried out executions, Sudan and Botswana.

In Kenya, more than 4,000 prisoners had their death sentences commuted to imprisonment.

“Burundi and Togo abolished the death penalty for all crimes in 2009 and that was certainly a further sign of the world continuing its move towards abolishment,” said Luther.

But he says in some countries the number of executions remains high. Amnesty estimates several thousand people were executed in China in 2009, but Luther says an exact figure is impossible to gauge.

“There is sort of a shroud of secrecy that hangs over the death penalty in China and we are challenging China in this report to lift that shroud of secrecy,” adds Luther. “China, in fact, has said that it has decreased the use of the death penalty in the country, but frankly it needs to make those statistics public to show this is really the case.”

Beijing says details of its executions are a state secret. But it says the number of executions has gone down since 2007, after it became mandatory for death sentences to be reviewed by a higher court.

Outside of China, Amnesty says 714 people were executed in 18 countries in 2009. The countries that carried out the highest number of executions were Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Amnesty warned that some countries are using capital punishment to send political messages, silence opponents or promote political agendas – this is especially the case, it says, in China, Sudan, and Iran.

“What we do see and this is a reflection of some of the wider trends is that if you take Iran, the use of the death penalty to send political messages or to silence opponents was very clear I think,” said Luther. “That pattern was particularly acute in the period, the two months following the presidential election in June 2009.”

In Iran 388 people were executed in 2009. Luther says 112 of those took place in the eight weeks following the presidential election.

Amnesty says for the first time since it began keeping records there were no executions in Europe.

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Friends call for China to free a journalist widely seen as pro-Beijing.

Gheyret Niyaz in a screen grab from Uyghurbiz.net on March 25, 2010 HONG KONG—Supporters of a jailed ethnic Uyghur journalist have organized an online campaign for his release, nearly six months after his detention for talking to foreign media about the deadly July 2009 ethnic riots in far-northwestern China.

Gheyret Niyaz, 50, a former deputy director of the official Xinjiang Legal Daily, was employed at the official Xinjiang Economic Daily as a journalist at the time of his detention on Oct. 4, 2009. His family received a warrant for his arrest four days later, relatives said.

He is now being held at the Heavenly Mountain District [Tianshan Chu] detention center in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), according to friends.

Police said in detaining Gheyret Niyaz that “he did too many interviews with foreign media about the July 5 Urumqi riots,” one source said.

Uyghur activists in exile have expressed shock at his arrest because he was widely regarded as pro-government, even warning XUAR officials in July that ethnic riots could be imminent, although the exact content of his warning is unknown.

After the riots, Gheyret Niyaz gave interviews to several foreign publications in which criticized the unequal distribution of wealth in Xinjiang and accused authorities of heavy-handedness in their campaign to fight Uyghur “separatism.”

“Gheyret has followed [one of the few paths] available to his people. I don’t believe he would have any regrets,” Ilham Tohti said.

Statements calling for his release appeared both on blogs and on Uyghurbiz.net, a multilingual site managed by Ilham Tohti.

“Gheyret Niyaz probably has been tortured or confessed; he needs special attention from the international community, because he has faced a double attack from [the central government] state and the regional authorities,” one statement said.

Ethnic tensions between Uyghurs and majority Han Chinese settlers have simmered for years, and erupted in July 2009 in rioting that left some 200 people dead, according to the Chinese government’s tally.

Uyghurs say they have long suffered ethnic discrimination, oppressive religious controls, and continued poverty and joblessness despite China’s ambitious plans to develop its vast northwestern frontier.

Chinese authorities blame Uyghur separatists for a series of deadly attacks in recent years and accuse one group in particular of maintaining links to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.

Reported and translated by Shoret Hoshur for RFA’s Uyghur service. Service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written for the Web by Sarah Jackson-Han.